The Dummy Science of TurnItIn – (Part 4)

The Dummy Science of TurnItIn – (Part 4)

Every day a student, the aspiring writer, creates a piece of prose, a short story or even a simple poem, and turns it in for a grade to a teacher. Unfortunately, in many schools around the world, they are forced to first submit their copyrighted work to a system that is supposed to ensure they did not steal it from another student. Teachers who utilize TurnItIn software do so at the peril of their students’ intellectual property rights. Yes, plagiarism is a problem in our world, but whose fault is it anyway, the writer or the educational environment?

In today's world we have advanced technology that is supposed to be more sophisticated and more advanced than the 1970s and 80s technology that we once used. TurnItIn software claims to be using advanced technology to show if a student has plagiarized another writer's work. Unfortunately, this software is not using advanced technology in their algorithm – instead, they are using old technology called "Fuzzy Logic".

What is "Fuzzy Logic" technology and how does it work?  Fuzzy Logic derives from

the Possibility theory which is an uncertainty theory devoted to the handling of incomplete information.  As such, it complements probability theory. It differs from the latter by the use of a pair of dual set-functions (possibility and necessity measures) instead of only one. This feature makes it easier to capture partial ignorance"(Dubois, Nguyen and Prade, 2000). 

For example, type in any word in Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any other internet search engine and hit enter: your internet provider will produce millions of like-minded documents with that one word contained in those documents. Every search engine uses "Fuzzy Logic" technology to return like-minded words. This is the same archaic technology being used by TurnItIn software, with one exception: they are comparing a student's work with the entire Internet and returning a false positive result. This in turn creates confusion on the student’s part because they know they just created their prose, yet TurnItIn claims they stole a majority of it from another student. What is the end result? A talented and creative student is charged with plagiarism – even by a once favorite teacher.

When we allow old technology to rule the classroom and destroy the creative juices of our students, we have failed those students. The caring teacher who is actively engaged in the improvement of his or her students has just lost their student to depression, isolation and a potentially time-consuming scandal. Teachers are often overwhelmed with workloads meant for three or four teachers, so they use programs like TurnItIn in order to reduce their exposure. But in abdicating their oversight, those who really suffer are the students.

To use such a software at the expense of a child's creativity, is a slap in the face of the educational system that exists to encourage a child to rise above their circumstances, improve beyond their means, and truly reach for the highest heights through realization of their academic skill. These imposing tools are a simple shortcut that neither helps the individual student, nor the classroom environment at large. It merely represents an area defined by a few self-interested cowards who have damaged the integrity of student work for the majority of responsible scholars. We all know that plagiarism hurts effective teaching and learning, and ultimately destroys aspiring students from trying in a system that has burned them in the past.

But it begs the question: Just how big of a problem is plagiarism? Is it something that everybody does to some degree – some just more skilled and deliberate than others? Are we talking of a disease of pandemic proportions, a veritable academic plague that everyone suffers from at least partial symptoms? Or is it just a secret sin that affects only a small percentage of students?

Of 56,611 undergraduates surveyed in a 2005 study by Duke University's Center for Academic Integrity, 37 percent admitted copying Internet material without attribution, compared with 10 percent in 1999. –Emily Sachar 

Plagiarism is a problem. But is it not the responsibility of the teacher to teach the right way to cite a copied material, versus accusing a student of plagiarism? Is it not the teacher’s job to point out mistakes in the classroom where the student can learn from their mistakes in a safe environment? Instead of teaching, many instructors take the word of a piece of software over doing their job properly. They neglect teaching students effective writing skills, which includes proper citations of others’ work. Isn’t that part of the college experience: growing, learning as well as teaching proper referencing?

TurnItIn software proponents admit their software benefits at best, “the vast majority.” But a further viewing of the Duke University study shows the vast majority of students cheat in some manner. So is the system helping to turn the tide of student cheating simply by its use? That is what TurnItIn would want you to believe. Yet their methods of detection are suspect at best, and libelous at worst.

In a plea to his university, Mike Smit encourages those who make the decisions to take a closer look at TurnItIn and its implications.

“I doubt the service's efficacy. In a series of test submissions, I found that even very, very minor alterations to text copied from a paper known to be in the database were sufficient to trick the system. TurnItIn.com has known properties. If it is so easily fooled, it loses both its deterrent value and its inherent value.” –Mike Smit [TurnItIn.com at Dalhousie - An Open Letter]

Smit goes on to state how a writer who publishes his own weblog, assuming that TurnItIn adds this internet content to its database, could end up plagiarizing themselves by testing positive for expanding on their own work! Since each entry in the TurnItIn database is allegedly stripped of authorship, a published author taking a university course could end up being flagged for using selections from their own published work.  “In this world of blogging and instant online publishing, it may be more common than you think.” [Smit] 

David E. Harrington goes further by conducting his own test:

I wanted to test TurnItIn but needed a suspicious manuscript. I had one in my hands—Shoplifting: A Social History. I suspected Kerry Segrave of plagiarism when I heard echoes of his book while reading New York Times articles he cites. He cites a lot of them—35 in the first 14 pages! To investigate my suspicions, I created a document containing the 14 pages stripped of direct quotations and another one containing the New York Times articles. I began by searching for identical phrases (of at least 6 words) in the two documents using the open source software Copyfind, which highlighted the matches it found in each document and produced the metric that 15 percent of the early pages of Shoplifting were taken verbatim from the New York Times. – David Harrington, the Economist 

But this 15% positive test did not tell the whole story:

This measure captures only the most flagrant form of plagiarism, where passages are copied from one document and pasted unchanged into another.  Just as shoplifters slip the goods they steal under coats or into pocketbooks, most plagiarists tinker with the passages they copy before claiming them as their own.  In other words, they cloak their thefts by scrambling the passages and right-clicking on words to find synonyms.  This isn’t writing; it is copying, cloaking and pasting; and it’s plagiarism. –[Harrington, same source]

Harrington notes that scrambling words, paraphrasing sentences, and re-wording by using an in-program thesaurus are ways to avoid honest detection of dishonest practices. After further analysis, he discovers that almost 33% of the work is actually plagiarized by the use of order changes and synonyms from the original articles cited. He even reached out to the TurnItIn support team, but was told the lack of subscriptions to certain online publications negated the full reach of their software. What good is a system that cannot access all works with potential to be plagiarized? The sample size of the database is not nearly extensive enough to fully protect the educational institution from unoriginal work.

In this case, knowledge of the methods used may be inherent to the problem.

By noting the use of certain software detection methods, are colleges merely informing the real cheaters of the tricks they’ll need to employ to avoid discovery? And do the law-abiding students really suffer without adequate restraint on the part of the law-breakers? If these cheaters are going to find ways to cheat regardless of software used, is the benefit of not competing with these cheaters lost in the wash? Leaving the well-meaning students with an intrusive and accusatory device that might trip them up at the expense of their time, money, and academic integrity?

What happens to the minority of users who do not intend to cheat yet must spend hours trying to revise and reword their original work simply because a piece of software warns them of potential plagiarism? What happens to the well-meaning student who lacks the skills necessary to synthesize the guided thoughts of others in producing a truly original work? TurnItIn only favors those who conform to its mold of academic inquiry. Its effectiveness has not been fully investigated. And its reach may not cover all possible sources of plagiaristic work.

 “According to iParadigms the only option available to a student no matter what iParadigms does to the student (including selling his or her personal information to spammers, criminals, or a “paper mill”) is to stop using the site.  In return for this it seems that neither the teachers nor students are guaranteed that the site will even work at all, or that information they submit to the site will not be stolen by hackers (see “Warranty Disclaimer” section).” –Fairfax County Public School Principal’s letter  

Those who are concerned about the security implications and intellectual abuses of this software are left with little to no recourse. They may file complaints or lawsuits, but at their own risk and expense. Per the contracts with educational institutions, TurnItIn is not even financially liable to cover the expense of the schools in such lawsuits. The legal cowardice and dummy science has to end. TurnItIn owes much more to an academic world that is increasingly trusting their company and their database to help their clients produce better scholars. And the security implications do not disappear for the dissatisfied, as their only legal recourse is to excuse themselves from future use of the software – their past submissions already deemed the legal property of the database. And these past submissions may expose the student’s information should the database ever be hacked. At best, TurnItIn leaves past, present and future clients exposed.

Invited co-author of this article, Sean McGowan is published author, a teacher of Civics and American History, as well as a Chaplain.

Part 4B:  Academia Plagiarizes its Students